IN 1995, buoyed by an overdeveloped sense of
boundless possibilities, SA embarked on much needed reform of our
racially segregated, unequal education system. The African National
Congress (ANC) settled on a first-class Rolls-Royce curriculum that was
called outcomes-based education, grafted on to third-class
infrastructure and — save for those at the nation’s elite public and
private schools — a desperately underprepared teacher corps. The result
was as predictable as it was tragic: today our education rankings are
among the worst in the world.
With National Health Insurance
(NHI), we are about to do exactly the same. This time, we do so with our
eyes wide open amid unprecedented economic and political gloom,
repeating history not once, as a famous 19th-century political economist
once said, but twice: the first time as tragedy, the second time as
farce. Henry Kissinger once remarked that learning from history is
everything, and the principal lesson of the past 20 years of democracy
is to bite off only as much as you can chew, or there may be nothing to
chew on at all.
 |
| Health clinic |
